Screen Capture Plugin for Writer

18May08

Here’s a first crack at a plugin for Windows Live Writer that lets you easily insert screen captures into your blog posts. You can capture a window, a rectangular region, or the whole desktop. Sort of like the Snipping Tool in Vista, but without the ability to capture free-form regions, and minus the annoying red border.

Note that for capturing a window or the whole desktop, (Alt+)PrintScreen and Paste work just about as well.

Later this week, I’ll write an installer and put it on the Gallery. In the meantime, just download the file below to your C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory.

If you select Window and then click on another window, it should capture that window. Oh… if you have Writer maximized then you won’t be able to see any other windows. Maybe I should add an option to minimize Writer during capture…

Hi Joe:
Very good plugin that you have developed, simple and effective. Nevertheless I have a small question, where it keeps the images that it captures?
I mean, I like to backup all the images I publish but I don’t know in wich folder is saved the capture.

Hi Jay, that’s interesting–why do you want JPG? Are you doing screen caps of photographs? For most screenshot scenarios PNG will give you both higher quality and smaller (or at least comparable) file sizes.

Thanks Joe for the reply. From my experience, JPG always make smaller size for photo (without sacrificing much quality). PNG will result best for vector graphic. PNG will always give better graphic since it use “lossless” compression (compare to JPG which using “lossy” compression), but doesn’t meant we need high quality all the time. That’s why maybe you can give the user an option, so they can decide which one will fit their needs. From my blog you can see I utilize your tool mostly for screen caps.

And maybe you can take a look at the polaroid plugin.. It has nice option page, and quite useful ability like automatically adding rel=”lightbox” HTML code.. very useful if you use lightbox effect like me.. 🙂

I disagree with the above writer who says that PNG files will give amaller or comparable sizes to JPG. For natural images nothing could be further from the truth. Even at high quality setting where the output is indistinguishable from the original, JPG files are almost always much smaller than PNGs.